John Kotter - How to Manage Change - A Sense of (The Right Kind Of) Urgency

In his seminal 1995 book "Leading Change" John Kotter introduced his eight-step change process, the first of which is to create urgency. Kotter suggests, that for change to be successful, at least 75% of a company's management needs to "buy into" the change.

So for change to happen there needs to be a shared a sense of urgency around the need for change. And this will result from honest and open dialogue with your people about what's happening in your market and with your competition. If many people start talking about the change you propose, the urgency can build and feed on itself.

"A Sense of Urgency" (Harvard Business Press, 2008) is the title of Kotter's latest book on change management and change leadership in organisations. Here he develops the theme from the first step of "Leading Change" and highlights the 2 types of urgency:

(1) Inward looking - panic driven urgency

This is the urgency born of the "knee jerk" reaction and is fear based. A fear based on losing something. It is unproductive and drains people of energy. It is characterized by frantic and frenetic activity - sometimes known as the "headless chicken" syndrome. People are fearful of losing their jobs and keep on taking on more and more often working 12-14 hour days filled with endless meetings.

Kotter believes that one reason for the catastrophic 70% failure rate of all change initiatives is the leaders do not create a positive sense of urgency around what they are doing. They dive straight into a low level project based attempt at implementing a solution.

(2) Outward looking - risk / opportunity focused urgency

This "good" urgency is all about a constant focus on the external risks and opportunities. As Kotter says: "It involves relentless focus on doing only those things that move the business forward in the marketplace and on doing them right now, if not sooner."

Good leaders will, with the greatest sense of urgency, pay attention to the internal metrics of their business but they are much more focused and much more interested in what's happening on the outside: "They want to have as many metrics about their competitors as they do about themselves."

Kotter believes that all meetings should reference what is happening in the external world - or not take place!

He cites the example of a company installing a new software system and suggests that the leader should be saying: "...What other companies do we know that have done this? What problems did they solve, and how did they solve them? Wouldn't that be useful information? Let's get it."

Ultimately, Kotter believes that (a) outward focused "good" urgency energizes people and enables to generate positive emotions and (b) it is the responsibility of the leader to model this by example.

In my experience, the quality of leadership that you provide is one of the top 5 factors that will determine whether you really do succeed and realise the benefits with your change initiative - or you join the long list of 70% failures.